Budget Kabuki

Talk about your meaningless exercises:

In what amounts to a scene out of Hollywood's version of executive power, President Obama will convene his first Cabinet meeting this morning and order his department chiefs to immediately cut a combined $100 million from their budgets.

Like the main character in the fantasy "Dave," Obama appears to be trying to work the nation's books, though the $100 million figure amounts to a drop in the $3.5 trillion bucket given preliminary approval earlier this month by Congress.

And, it does little to erase the more than $1.2 trillion deficit that has become the rallying cry of fiscal conservatives.

One single F-22 fighter costs $140 million. $100 million in U.S. budget terms is nothing.

John Miller at The Corner puts it this way:

In our age of trillion-dollar budgets and deficits, $100 million is a rounding error at a Department of Agriculture regional office. The entire purpose of these cuts will be to fend off critics who are eager to say that the Obama administration didn't downsize any government programs. They will allow for the creation of a talking-points memo that says, oh yes we have.

It's all about the show, not the results.

UPDATE: Another Corner commenter notes that reducing $100 million from the federal budget is like a family earning $40,000 cutting their budget by $1.